Engraved lighter from a displaced persons camp

Tibor Stern was born April 16, 1925, in Oradea, Romania, to a Jewish father, Edmund, and a Catholic mother, Juliana. He had one older brother. Their father died when Tibor was very young. Their mother took them to Hungary, but had difficulty providing for them. Tibor’s older brother was adopted by an uncle, and Tibor was placed in a Jewish orphanage. He stayed there until 1942, when he was 17.

By then, there were restrictive laws in Nazi-allied Hungary against the Jews. Jewish men age 18 and older were drafted into forced labor. Tibor tried to escape to Palestine to join the British army and fight against Germany. He made it as far as Romania but was arrested. The police beat him, trying to get him to confess that he was a saboteur. He was jailed for 90 days for illegal entry. He returned to Hungary and was arrested again and sentenced to 10 years hard labor.

He was among 200 men, mostly Jews, who were sent to Germany as forced laborers. After the bombing of Dresden in February 1945, the group was sent there to clean debris and remove bodies. The SS overseers were particularly harsh and did not provide the laborers with enough to eat. In May 1945, the group was marched west from Dresden. Along the way, they were locked in a barn. After two days, they were liberated by Russian troops. Of the original 200, 46 had survived the three-year ordeal.

Tibor’s weight was down to 88 pounds by then. He recovered for six weeks in a makeshift hospital operated by the Russians, then received a makeshift passport to allow him to return to Hungary. He walked the 300 miles to Budapest, begging for food along the way, and found that his brother had survived the war as well.

Tibor ended up in the Cinecitta displaced person’s camp in Rome. There he saw the trauma among his fellow survivors. People cried at night under their blankets, or lay on the floor for days at a time, staring at the ceiling.

In the camp, he had the nickname Tarzan. Even mail addressed to him by that name would reach him. On November 29, 1947, when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, Tibor was among a crowd of 2,000 Jews who celebrated in St. Peter’s Square. Tibor emigrated to the United States in 1948.